The Internet has quickly grown from an obscure resource for high level researchers to a ubiquitous resource having hundreds of millions of pages of content which is accessible by millions of users. To locate and access specific information of interest within this vast collection of distributed content, various search engines exist which query the pages of content on a continuous basis and generate a searchable database in which the various pages of content are listed. A user desiring access to content enters a set of search terms in a search engine which are believed to be relevant to the desired content. A list of content pages which match some relevancy criteria is provided by the search engine in response.
There are numerous search engines, such as www.excite.com, www.yahoo.com, www.altavista.com and www.google.com, which provide such a service. While the particulars of each search algorithm differ, each of these search engines provide results which are listed by some algorithmically determined relevancy measure.
An alternative to the computer generated relevancy measure which is provided by a number of conventional search engines, some search engines, such as www.goto.com, provide a pay for placement feature which effects where particular content will be listed in response to a user search. In this pay for placement model, advertisers pay a bid amount for certain keywords which are expected to be relevant to the goods and services offered on the content pages they provide. If a user's search includes a keyword which has been purchased by one or more advertisers, these content pages will be listed with a higher priority, in descending order, starting from the highest bidding advertising. In the goto.com pay for placement model, advertisers pay the bid amount when a user clicks on the displayed content page listing, which provides a hypertext link to the advertisers content pages. The pay for placement model results in the generation of a database of advertisers which are willing to pay a certain denomination when a user actively clicks on a listing. However, in known search engines, this database is only accessible through the search service provider's own Internet webpage, which limits the reach of this service to advertisers. In other words, the scope of access to such a search engine is directly related to the brand recognition of the search engine.